Computers

I’ve been told that I have too many computers! I tend to agree especially with the number I have acquired in the past few years. Thankfully I’ve started pruning them out..

History:

My first computer was an Amstrad cpc464 with colour monitor. Great for simple games, and it kept me occupied as a kid.

First PC was an AST pentium 133 with a 2.1gb harddrive and 16mb ram running Win95. It got upgraded and frankensteined over the next few years up to 64mb of ram, 2 harddrives for 20gb, a cd writer and other goodies like a network card and a voodoo1 card.

After I got bought some components from various people in UL such as a p3-500 chip, 265mb ram, 9gb scsi disc, 73gb scsi disc, a SoundBlaster Live! 64 soundcard and a TNT 16mb pci graphics card. I built up a rather nice pc from these, and I watched my first downloaded film on this – ‘The Matrix’ and I went to the cinema twice to see that film based purely on this!

I upgraded the motherboard, the graphics card, memory and a few other bits over the next year or so. It was great as a college machine, multibooting linux and various windows installations. This was the first case that I prepped and painted, and I installed a side-window in it as well. All long before it became popular.

I started overclocking this machine too, after buying a p3-650/100 socket chip on a slocket adapter. This chip ram at over 900 safely and booted at 1.1ghz. Fantastic performance from a cpu that I paid €150ish for.

I did an upgrade jump then to an AMD64 3000+ with 1gb of ram, geforce 6600gt vivo graphics and a Chieftec case that I prettified with EL cable along the louvres in the front, LED illumination inside, UV cable sleeving and UV cold-cathode lamps as well. This was a fantastic machine, and my girlfriend at the time bought me a 200gb harddrive as a wonderful Christmas present, I added another 400gb later. It’s a pity that this machine was stolen from the house in 109, and this pretty much killed my casemod desires. (may that thief get crotchrot.)

I bought a Lidl special athlon64 4200+ a few years later. I have a few issues with it but it is serviceable for the moment. I ordered a new upgrade/replacement motherboard as I was getting fed up of not being able to populate all 4 memory slots and I was getting fed up of the bluescreens and crashes in all operating systems caused by high SATA i/o. That new motherboard fixed a few issues for sure. Since then I had upgraded my graphics card to an MSI HD5770 Hawk as the 7600GT was no longer giving DVI output which was a bit of an issue. I also got a few harddrives which I’m using in Raid for speed and reliability. I also got my hands on an Athlonx2 5000+ Black Edition chip to allow me to move from the then standard 2.2ghz to about 3.2ghz for a faster machine.

My current desktop machine is a Behemoth of a machine: Intel Core I7-3930 running at ~4.3Ghz, 32Gb of ram, 4x1Tb drives in RAID 1+0 with an 240gb SSD for the OS, currently with an Asus GTX660, running current Gentoo and Windows 7. Definitely don’t want to downgrade to Win8 or Win 1-0 as those are terrible UI experiences plus information leakers.